archaeology narrative and the politics of the past the view from southern maryland

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In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches—archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical—to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region’s vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary’s City, established as Maryland’s first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary’s City, for example, early on became the center of Maryland’s “founding narrative” of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area’s Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region’s more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research—particularly archaeological research—that produces new stories and “counter-narratives” that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past. Julia A. King is an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she coordinates the Museum Studies Program and directs the SlackWater Center, a consortium devoted to exploring, documenting, and interpreting the changing landscapes of Chesapeake communities. She is also coeditor, with Dennis B. Blanton, of Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region.

Traces three centuries of history surrounding the first President's childhood home, documenting archaeological discoveries of artifacts and Washington's personal home while citing the region's historical roles as a Civil War battleground and center of debate between land developers and preservationists.

In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, it became increasingly difficult for Americans outside the world of politics to have frank and open discussions about the institution of slavery, as divisive sectionalism and heated ideological rhetoric circumscribed public debate. To talk about slavery was to explore--or deny--its obvious shortcomings, its inhumanity, its contradictions. To celebrate it required explaining away the nation's proclaimed belief in equality and its public promise of rights for all, while to condemn it was to insult people who might be related by ties of blood, friendship, or business, and perhaps even to threaten the very economy and political stability of the nation. For this reason, Paul D. Naish argues, Americans displaced their most provocative criticisms and darkest fears about the institution onto Latin America. Naish bolsters this seemingly counterintuitive argument with a compelling focus on realms of public expression that have drawn sparse attention in previous scholarship on this era. In novels, diaries, correspondence, and scientific writings, he contends, the heat and bluster of the political arena was muted, and discussions of slavery staged in these venues often turned their attention south of the Rio Grande. At once familiar and foreign, Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and the independent republics of Spanish America provided rhetorical landscapes about which everyday citizens could speak, through both outright comparisons or implicit metaphors, what might otherwise be unsayable when talking about slavery at home. At a time of ominous sectional fracture, Americans of many persuasions--Northerners and Southerners, Whigs and Democrats, scholars secure in their libraries and settlers vulnerable on the Mexican frontier--found unity in their disparagement of Latin America. This displacement of anxiety helped create a superficial feeling of nationalism as the country careened toward disunity of the most violent, politically charged, and consequential sort.

Southern Maryland is made up of a collection of peninsulas covered in low rolling hills, fields, forests, swamps, and waterways leading to the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. As such, this area enjoyed relative isolation and small population for over three centuries despite its proximity to cities such as Alexandria, Annapolis, Baltimore, and Washington. Those who did settle here developed a close connection to its farms, waterways, and natural remoteness. Southern Maryland, known for the state's earliest Colonial settlements, is composed of three of the state's oldest counties: St. Mary's, Charles, and Calvert. Although largely agricultural and maritime in outlook, this region was also the birthplace of the nation's ideal of religious freedom and many of its greatest citizens, including leaders of the Revolution, the early national government, and the state. Many of their homes and churches survive as historic landmarks, or their existence has been documented and preserved for posterity.

What did California look like before Hollywood? Before the Gold Rush? Before the missions? Brian Fagan, the best known popular archaeology writer in America, is your tour guide on a fascinating trip across the Golden State before the arrival of Europeans. Fagan tells of the first groups who drifted into the state over 13,000 years ago and how their descendants used the land and sea to survive in a fragile environment subject to earthquake, drought, and flood. On your tour, you will visit the shellmounds of San Francisco Bay, salmon trappers of the northern streams, acorn gatherers of the Central Valley, Chumash villages on the Santa Barbara coast, and shamans who painted mysterious figures on stone. Fagan shows how archaeologists scientifically reconstruct this lost history from fragments of bone, shell, and stone, from travellers' and scholars' descriptions of vanished peoples, and from the stories told by the tribal members themselves. Join a famous archaeologist on this captivating journey and find out what important lessons this story has for California's future.

Using an innovative combination of archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistory, Stephen R. Potter traces the rise of the Chicacoans, whose domain on the south shore of the Potomac River straddled the boundary between the Powhatans and the Conoys. By presenting a case study of the Chicacoans from A.D. 200 to the early seventeenth century, Potter offers readers a window onto the development of ALgonquian culture in the Chesapeake and illuminates the responses of its constituent societies to the invading Europeans. He examines the stratification of individual cheifdoms into elites and masses of tribute-paying commoners, and he demonstratesthe progressive consolidation of ALgonquian peoples in the century preceding the European influx.

As showcases for dramatic changes in garden style and new technology, world’s fairs offered leading landscape designers and nurserymen the chance to tempt visitors to try new garden trends in backyards across the nation. From horticultural innovations to new landscape styles, the wonders displayed at these fairs had a distinct influence on America’s largest urban parks. In World’s Fair Gardens, Cathy Jean Maloney offers a lavishly illustrated exploration of the gardens and grounds of America’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world’s fairs. Maloney describes the landscapes of nine of America’s great fairs from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia to the 1940 World’s Fair of Tomorrow in New York, many of whose legacies are still evident. The fairs also created an arena for intense competition among nations. Foreign plant introductions included English rhododendrons in Philadelphia, Mexican cacti in New Orleans, and Japanese gardens at nearly all the fairs, a feat considering the formidable challenge of shipping live plants great distances in those times. Maloney also explores innovations from the "glazeless putty system" greenhouse in 1884 and cold storage systems in 1904 to modernistic glass fences in 1940. Complete with more than 50 color and 70 black-and-white illustrations, World’s Fair Gardens will appeal to historians, gardeners, urban planners, landscape architects, public park advocates, preservationists, and anyone interested in the history of these global festivals. Supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts